Appalachian Figures
On paper, Henry “Hank” Presswood’s life reads like a tidy baseball biography. Born in a Mississippi company town in 1921, he worked in the lumber mill, served in the Army during the Second World War, played shortstop and third base in the Negro American League, then spent three decades in a steel mill in industrial Chicago.
The reality is harder and more interesting. Presswood grew up in Electric Mills, Mississippi, a mill town carved out of pine woods in Kemper County, a place so steeped in racial violence that Black Mississippians called it “Bloody Kemper.” He learned baseball on dusty company diamonds in the shadow of a fully electrified sawmill, then carried those skills into a segregated big time that was already beginning to disappear under the pressure of integration.
By the time he died in Chicago in 2014 at ninety three years old, Hank Presswood had become one of the last living players who could stand in front of a classroom or a ballpark crowd and say, from memory, what it felt like to chase line drives in the Negro Leagues while Jim Crow ruled back home.
Electric Mills: Company Town in “Bloody Kemper”
Electric Mills did not start as a place. It started as a mill.
In the early twentieth century, Sumter Lumber Company relocated its burned out Alabama operation to Kemper County, Mississippi, and built a new plant at a whistle stop called Bogda Station. The company erected what local historian Lee Thompson describes as the first fully functioning electric lumber mill east of the Mississippi River, then wrapped an entire town around it.
Company town meant company everything. Sumter owned the houses, the hospital, the movie theater, the store, the ice plant, the dairy, and the athletic field. The mill furnished electricity for homes at no cost. There were schools, churches, and a hospital for white residents, and separate facilities for the “colored folks” who worked and lived on the other side of the color line.
Baseball grew out of that landscape. Electric Mills had an athletic field and a culture of company and sandlot ball. Later accounts place Henry’s father, Dee Presswood, among the many Black laborers at the Sumter mill. Henry followed him into the plant as a teenager and spent his free time playing for local clubs like the Mill City Jitterbugs.
All of this unfolded in Kemper County, a place that Black Mississippians knew as “Bloody Kemper.” In March 1934, three Black men were arrested in the county, tortured into “confessions,” and sentenced to death in a sham trial. Their case, Brown v. Mississippi, went to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 1936 that convictions based solely on confessions extracted by torture violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
Black newspapers did not mince words. A 1935 Philadelphia Tribune story carried the headline “Judge Lynch Presides: A Night in Bloody Kemper County, Mississippi” and described mob violence and near lynching in grim detail. Decades later, Kemper County activist Obie Clark recalled that local Black families still used the phrase “Bloody Kemper” and taught their children how to survive it, right down to entering white owned stores by the back door.
That was the world in which Henry Presswood was born on October 7, 1921. Electric Mills offered electricity, baseball, and pay envelopes. Kemper County offered all the dangers of Jim Crow Mississippi.
Growing Up Presswood in a Ghost Town
According to Negro Leagues researcher Ryan Whirty, Henry was the second child of Dee and Josephine Presswood, both Alabama natives who settled in Electric Mills along State Highway 45. Census entries from 1930 and 1940 place the family in heavily Black neighborhoods within the company town, which fit the racially segregated pattern of life there.
Presswood finished two years of high school before working full time at the Sumter mill, then began playing shortstop for the Mill City Jitterbugs, a semi pro team connected to the town and its workers. Baseball in Wartime, a project that tracks World War II service by ballplayers, notes that he also spent the late 1930s and early 1940s with the Denkman All Stars, a prominent Black team based in Canton, Mississippi.
In 1941, the same year that the United States entered World War II, Sumter Lumber shut down its Electric Mills operation. The mill that had made the town possible also unmade it. By mid century Electric Mills had become, in Whirty’s words, “little more than a ghost town,” a status it largely retains today.
For Black families like the Presswoods, that closure meant choices that were not really choices. You could leave for another mill town, for a nearby city, or for one of the major migration streams that carried Southern Black workers toward industrial jobs in the Midwest. Presswood’s path went first to the Army, then to Cleveland.
Soldier, Then Shortstop
In February 1945, at age twenty three, Henry Presswood enlisted in the United States Army. Baseball in Wartime places his service from 1945 to 1947, a period when hundreds of Negro Leaguers and semi pro players put their careers on hold to serve in uniform.
An MLB affiliated blog run with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum lists “Henry ‘Hank’ Presswood, SS/3B, Kansas City Monarchs, Army 1945–1947” among the many Negro League players who served in World War II. The list leans heavily on Gary Bedingfield’s Baseball in Wartime research, which has become a foundational reference for this aspect of Black baseball history.
After his discharge, Presswood returned briefly to the familiar surroundings of the Denkman All Stars in Canton. Then a former teammate changed his life. In a 2010 phone interview with writer Nick Diunte, Presswood recalled that Cleveland Buckeyes slugger Willie Grace showed up at his job with the team’s foreman in tow and told him the Buckeyes wanted him. Presswood was stunned, then said yes.
As he later told the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, “I was very excited to play baseball in the league.”
Shortstop for the Cleveland Buckeyes
Presswood reported to Cleveland’s Negro American League club in 1948. At that moment, the Buckeyes were defending league champions, and integration had already begun to pull Black stars like Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby into Major League Baseball.
Contemporary Black press coverage treated the young Mississippian as a serious contender for the starting job. In early 1948, the Cleveland Call and Post listed him among those fighting for the Buckeyes’ shortstop spot. Later that summer the paper praised his play in a single, glowing line: “Henry Presswood, a Mississippi lad, is shining bright at short and has been hitting well.”
Modern statistical projects like Seamheads and Baseball Reference, which reconstruct Negro League box scores from surviving box scores and game stories, credit Presswood with modest offensive numbers as Cleveland’s shortstop, including a .198 average in the 1948 season. Those numbers, incomplete as they are, do not capture the defensive reputation hinted at in press coverage. Writers noted his speed, strong arm, and ability to play a deep shortstop while adjusting to hitters, something Presswood himself described in later interviews.
He held down the Buckeyes job through the 1950 season, playing alongside established stars like Sam Jethroe and Sam “Toothpick” Jones as the Negro American League tried to survive the dual pressures of integration and economic decline.
Monarchs Third Baseman and “Baby” Presswood
After the Buckeyes folded, Presswood stepped away from league play for a season. In 1952 he signed with the Kansas City Monarchs, a club that had once featured legends like Satchel Paige and whose regular shortstop at that point was a young Ernie Banks. Presswood shifted to third base and came under the tutelage of manager Buck O’Neil.
O’Neil gifted him a nickname. Presswood later recalled that the skipper started calling him “Baby,” a name that stuck with him for the rest of his life. In a Negro Leagues Museum profile based on the Legacy 2000 Players’ Reunion, Presswood looked back on that period with pride. He said he owed his chance to Willie Grace and that he had not let his managers in Cleveland or Kansas City down.
Presswood’s years with the Monarchs unfolded during the twilight of organized Negro League baseball. By the early 1950s the Negro American League functioned more as a quasi minor league and barnstorming circuit, yet the Monarchs still exported talent like Banks into the integrated Major Leagues. Presswood’s role in that environment was not as a headline star, but as a steady infielder and veteran presence who bridged the gap between prewar Black baseball and the new integrated era.
Steel Mills, Softball, and Storytelling
When his Negro League years ended, Henry and his wife Thelma settled in the Chicago area. There he did what millions of Southern Black migrants did in the mid twentieth century. He traded pine woods and cotton fields for smokestacks and shift work. Presswood hired on at Inland Steel in East Chicago, Indiana, one of the major employers on the South Shore of Lake Michigan, and stayed for more than thirty years.
He did not stop playing ball. The Negro Leagues Museum profile notes that he became a standout in fast pitch softball for the Inland Steel company team. In his own words, “I played fast pitch softball at Inland Steel, where I was employed. I have quite a few trophies and a jacket I received for good sportsmanship.”
That combination of shop floor labor and company sponsored sport would look familiar to coal camp athletes and textile mill leaguers across the greater South and Appalachia. Presswood’s story reminds us that industrial ball was not confined to the white company towns of eastern Kentucky or West Virginia. It extended into Black neighborhoods in places like East Chicago, where former Negro Leaguers spent their evenings under factory lights.
By the early twenty first century, Presswood had become a respected elder and a public storyteller for the Negro League legacy. He appeared at high schools, minor league parks, and museum events, answering questions from fans who had grown up hearing only the Major League side of baseball’s history. Baseball Happenings, which interviewed him several times, describes him joyfully holding court with students and collectors who wanted to hear about the Buckeyes and Monarchs.
Late Recognition: Drafted and Carded at Last
For much of his life, Presswood’s achievements existed in the memories of teammates, the fading clippings of Black newspapers, and the chance conversations of fellow steelworkers on break. That changed in his eighties.
In 2008 Major League Baseball staged a one time “Special Negro Leagues Draft” in which each franchise ceremonially selected a surviving Negro League player as a symbolic member of their organization. Presswood was chosen by the Chicago White Sox as a shortstop and third baseman, belated recognition from the Major League club in his adopted city.
Two years later, the Topps Company honored him with a card in its Allen and Ginter set. It was, in his words, his first real “rookie card,” arriving more than six decades after his professional debut. Collectors began mailing those cards to him by the dozens, asking for his signature. Presswood told Diunte that he was grateful people were interested and that he enjoyed signing and returning the cards, even when the mail piled up.
These late life honors did not rewrite the segregated history that had kept him out of organized white baseball. They did, however, place his name in media guides, statistical registers, and living rooms far from Kemper County. They also gave him a new platform to do what he clearly loved in his later years: talk baseball with anyone who would listen.
“Bloody Kemper” and the World That Made Hank Presswood
The Negro Leagues Up Close blog devoted a separate essay to the phrase “Bloody Kemper” after Presswood’s death, tracing how Black reporters and community members had used the term to describe Kemper County’s long history of racial terror. The author highlighted a 1935 Philadelphia Tribune article on the torture case that became Brown v. Mississippi and drew on oral history interviews with Kemper County activist Obie Clark, who remembered being taught as a boy how to survive in a place where lynching was a constant threat.
Within this wider context, Electric Mills looks different. The town’s promotional material and white authored reminiscences emphasize modern machinery, neat company houses, and community amenities. The Black sources remind us that even an electrically powered sawmill town had to navigate the same Jim Crow currents that produced terror trials, lynchings, and everyday humiliations in the surrounding county.
Presswood’s life sits right at that intersection. He was born in a company town that embodied early twentieth century industrial optimism and racial segregation. He played for semi pro and Negro League teams that showcased some of the finest baseball talent in the world while operating under a separate and unequal system. He worked for decades in a northern steel mill that depended on Southern Black laborers like him.
In Appalachia we often recall coal camp ballfields and mill league lineups as rural mountain phenomena. Hank Presswood’s story invites us to widen the lens to include the deep South and the Black diaspora that carried Southern ballplayers to the Midwest. The journey from Electric Mills to the Cleveland Buckeyes and Kansas City Monarchs, then on to Inland Steel, belongs in any discussion of working class sport and race in the twentieth century South.
When he died on December 27, 2014, in Chicago, the Negro Leagues lost another living witness. But his story still flickers in oral history recordings, black press box scores, scattered army records, and the worn corners of Allen and Ginter cards that young fans mailed to him for a signature. For researchers and families in Kemper County and beyond, those traces offer an invitation to keep following the ball from that electric sawmill town out into the wider world.
Sources & Further Reading
Henry “Hank” Presswood, HistoryMakers Video Oral History (Chicago Public Library streaming catalog entry, with biographical summary). Chicago Public Library
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, “Henry Presswood” personal profile and multimedia clips, including his comments on joining the league and working at Inland Steel. Negro Leagues Baseball eMuseum+1
Nick Diunte, “Hank Presswood is honored with Topps baseball card,” Baseball Happenings, July 27, 2010, and “Hank Presswood, 93, veteran of five Negro League seasons,” Baseball Happenings, December 31, 2014. Baseball Happenings+1
Ryan Whirty, “Henry Presswood, 1921–2014” and “Henry Presswood and ‘Bloody Kemper’,” The Negro Leagues Up Close (Home Plate Don’t Move blog), January 2015. The Negro Leagues Up Close+1
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, eMuseum entry for Henry “Hank” Presswood. Negro Leagues Baseball eMuseum
Baseball-Reference, “Henry Presswood Career Stats” (minor league and Negro League register) and player page. Baseball Reference+1
Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, player page “press01hen” and league history tables. Seamheads+1
“Hank Presswood,” Baseball in Wartime player biography. Baseball in Wartime
“Hank Presswood,” Hank Presswood entry on Wikipedia, with links to primary and secondary sources. Wikipedia
ElectricMills.org, “About” page, town history, and photographs of Sumter Lumber Company and the Electric Mills company town. Electric Mills
“Electric Mills, Mississippi,” Wikipedia entry, with notes on the town’s founding and decline. BioOne
“Henry Presswood and ‘Bloody Kemper’,” especially discussion of 1935 Philadelphia Tribune article “Judge Lynch Presides: A Night in Bloody Kemper County, Mississippi,” and Obie Clark’s oral history in the Civil Rights Documentation Project. The Negro Leagues Up Close+2The Negro Leagues Up Close+2
Mississippi Encyclopedia, “Brown v. Mississippi” entry, and Supreme Court decision Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278 (1936), for the legal aftermath of the Kemper County torture case. Mississippi Encyclopedia+2Justia Law+2
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and MLB.com, “Negro Leagues Players Played Major Role in World War II,” list of Negro League veterans including Henry Presswood. Monarchs to Grays to Crawfords
Gary Bedingfield, Baseball in Wartime profile of Hank Presswood (Army service 1945–1947). Baseball in Wartime
“2008 Special Negro Leagues Draft,” MLB materials cited in the Hank Presswood Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia
Topps Allen & Ginter 2010 set documentation and collector coverage of Hank Presswood’s card, as cited in Baseball Happenings. Baseball Happenings+1